Why this phobia to HTML mail?

[Simon Bowring]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 10:35:38 +0200, xavier caballe wrote:

>if you don't like, don't use it! That's fine for me. But please let me
>decide by myself if I want to use it.

You just don't seem to understand that the internet is reliant on 
*adherence* to *standards* by *everyone*!  By deciding to use HTML
mail, you are deciding on behalf of others, that they want HTML mail, 
that they can view it ok and are happy to receive it - if you were 
using Outlook, you may even be "deciding" to send them a virus. 
Who are you to decide what other people deem acceptable? The 
standards exist to avoid just this sort of thing!

Without standards adherance the interent and email could not exist, 
and the standards that "govern" HTML email simply do not define how it 
should all (inter-)work. You can "decide" this doen't matter if you want 
to, but it does!

A consequence of HTML email is that reliable interoperability *cannot* 
be guaranteed, and email is too important to allow that to happen.

There's just no "decision" to be made here - you can't decide its 
all going to  work!  The technically aware people here who understand 
these issues, cannot stop everyone else from disregarding these 
standards by "switching off" HTML email in their own emailers!

It is (but never should have been) your decision to (ab)use HTML email,
just as it's your decision to use "PDF mail" (if you can find or write 
a mail client that "supports" it), it's even your decision to drive on 
the wrong side of the road - but there are consequences to disregarding
standards (obviously some consequences are less dire than others!).

It's obviously quite acceptable to mail HTML or PDF files etc amongst 
"consenting adults", but the problem is that mailers default to 
this non-standard inappropriate behaviour, so most users have no 
idea that they are doing things "wrong", or that recipients 
won't necessarily see what the sender intended, or that recipients
may even have trouble interpretting the message at all, or that
the sender may be helping to propagate viruses around the internet!

Although the rise of Outlook and NetScape for email now means that most
installed email program "instances" default to using ill defined 
behaviour (what a "Good Thing(TM)" for the internet that is!), most 
actual email programs that exist don't support HTML email at all
This alone is reason enough for right thinking responsible people 
who give a shit about others to avoid sending HTML mails (and certainly 
not without getting the recipient to ok it in advance)!

If, for example, MS Outlook (and NS and PMMail/2000) defaulted to 
standard behaviour and warned users whenever they *elected* to send 
an HTML email that the recipient is only guaranteed to see the 
message *as sent* if they are also running Outlook, and that they 
*might* have problems viewing the message if they do not run 
Outlook, I would have *far* less of a problem with this "embrace, 
extend and break-interoperability" behaviour.

It's like a car company making a car that uses a non-standard signal for 
indicating before a turn - fortunately this is illegal because the 
consequences would be devastaing, clearing HTML email is extremely 
unlikey to cause injury, but it does expose people to potential 
mis-interpretation of the all important INFORMATION content of a 
message and potentially exposes them to viruses as well.

Again: HTML mail is NOT the answer to how to get rich text markup 
into email. There currently isn't a good standards based answer.
The best is the "defacto" standard markup that Steve's always talking 
about. Some mailers actually interpret *bold* and _underlined_ and 
/italic/ text etc, which is quite a nice feature (as long as it 
can be easily toggled on and off) [Feature request, Trevor!].

Maybe "one-day" open standards for rich text email (or rich text in 
general) will be adopted, it's even possible that the system adopted 
may be based around a subset of HTML, but these standards do not 
currently exist!

You can decide it's ok to ignore all this, and I can decide to argue
strongly against you, and I have Right on my side ;-) (And my Dad's 
probably bigger than yours ;-)

Simon